Composed on commission for the 1989 Organ Festival in Parainen, Finland, Mein Weg hat Gipfel und Wellentäler is one of only a handful of compositions for organ by Arvo Pärt. It takes its inspiration from a poem from Edmond Jabès Livre des Questions, particularly a line that provides the title: "My path has its peaks and its valleys..." The poem compares the ups and downs of living with the rise and fall of the ocean's waves, a topic that no doubt resonated closely with the composers deep religious convictions.

One can find this program portrayed in the very ink on the page; the piece is comprised almost entirely of long ascents and descents in all voices. A closer look reveals a kind of fractal structure to the piece: all voices play essentially the same figures, but at different speeds. The right hand begins with steady eighth notes, while the left hand follows in quarters. What seems at first to be mere accompaniment in the pedals actually turns out to be the wave motive in half notes. As the piece progresses, the waves become longer, their peaks and valleys further apart. This kind of structure, in which the same figures appear both through the lens of a telescope and that of a microscope, can be found in other works by Pärt as well. His Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten is largely constructed of a series of A minor descending scales occurring at various speeds, as is Festina Lente, whose title, "Fast-slow," describes this compositional process. While appealing to a the same modern desire for holism and interconnectedness that makes chaos math and fourier transforms so fascinating to hobby cosmologists, this technique actually finds its roots in Pärt's study of the music of the renaissance composer Johannes Ockeghem, who composed his Missa Prolationem according to similar principles.

Mein Weg hat Gipfel und Wellentäler is constructed according to Pärt's signature "tintinnabular" method, which places scalar lines in homophony with reiterated chord tones of the tonic. The style takes its name from a word that describes the sound of a bell: just as a bell has a strong sense of tonal focus within a rich spectrum of pitches, this provides an omnipresent sense of harmonic stability, while allowing a variety of dissonances to clash against the unmoving tonic. This strips normal tonality of its "goal-orientedness," making the tonic chord a sonority to be explored, rather than a kind of gravity against which to resist. This particular work strays from the frequent tintinnabular practice of observing strict diatonicism; clashes between G sharps and G naturals add a particularly vivid intervallic color. Perhaps this clash has a programmatic meaning within the E tonal center, corresponding with the opposing forces of joy and sorrow expressed in Jabès' poem.

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